Rest in Peace, Yahoo Directory

As of today, if you go to http://dir.yahoo.com (the familiar URL of the Yahoo Directory) you are redirected over to a directory called “Aabaco Small Business”, https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/.

Yahoo was quite the directory in its day. We have recommended getting a listing in it since about 1998. Listings used to be free, then they got greedy and started charging $300 ($600 for “adult” sites) per year for a listing.

If you have been advertising in the Yahoo Directory, you can still log in at Aabaco because they’ve kept your Yahoo username and login intact. Who knows for how long. With new branding comes a new broom and the sometimes overwhelming desire to use that new broom to sweep clean….

The great thing about the old Yahoo directory, which predated Google, was the human-edited nature of the directory. You couldn’t just submit a crap site, pay for a listing, and expect to get into the category you wanted. Oh, no. It had to pass a review by paid human reviewers (not volunteers, and not biased as the old DMOZ directory editors were). It often happened that some websites were just too crappy to get into the Yahoo Directory.

Hopefully Aabaco will keep up that tradition — but I’m not counting on it.

Here’s an idea for a directory that might work. Let’s call it the “Yeah-What Directory”. Start with a few hundred known websites: Google, Bing, AOL, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc. Now create short abstracts of the sites, such as this:

This site is where you can find pretty much anything on the web. Great maps, too! They also offer free analytics of your website traffic, other tools for webmasters, and free email (Gmail).

Now comes the fun part:

If you are an average marketer or website owner, and you want to add your site to the nice little core of sites already in the directory, you would be required to review ten of these sites already existing in the directory (randomly given to you to review) before you can add a site for others to abstract and review. Your reviews can be as short or as long as you want. The reviewers themselves will be reviewed, which will mostly prevent the “group think” and “unwisdom of the crowd” from piling crap on sites that don’t deserve it (think “Fox News” being given one star by leftists, and “Huff Post” being inundated with one star reviews by conservatives.) By reviewing the reviewers, what I mean is, “JoeBlow14″ seems terribly harsh here in this review. I’m going to give his review 1 out of 5 stars.”) Enough of that, and his reviews are ignored.

So – there you have it – the next billion dollar idea on the web. I’m giving it away here, free of charge, on the interwebs. I wonder if I can count it as a tax deduction…..